By Linda Forrest
A strange and perhaps first-of-its-kind legal situation caught my eye yesterday. A senior executive from DefJam Records was arrested for not Tweeting. Yes, you read that correctly – he refused to Tweet when the police demanded it of him and he was arrested on a litany of charges.
But, let’s back up a little.
Apparently all the kids are going crazy for Justin Bieber. I’m pretty far out of his target market, so the fact I’ve not heard of him shouldn’t surprise anyone. He’s a 15 year old pop singer who makes the girls’ hearts go pitter patter. Signed to DefJam, he was set to make an appearance Saturday at a shopping mall in Long Island. Being a savvy marketer, James Roppo, senior VP of sales for DefJam, Tweeted about the upcoming appearance, trying to drum up interest and ensure there would be a long line of adoring fans at the signing.
The tactic worked. A little too well. Three thousand young girls showed up, long before the star himself arrived, and the crowd quickly got out of control.
This is the point in the story where I debate whether I should disclose that maybe, just maybe, when I was a tween myself, there was a certain band that I was crazy about — I’m not saying who but it rhymes with Mew Hids on the Knock. And I just might have lined up outside a shopping mall in the dead of winter while I had chicken pox in order to get the autographs … of the band members’ mothers. And maybe, just maybe, I was so far back in the line that when a security guard shut the door to the mall saying that there was no way we would all get in, a mini riot of weeping young girls ensued. Maybe. Nope, too embarrassing – never happened.
Let’s just say that I can imagine how the scene quickly devolved. Hell hath no fury like 3,000 lovelorn 11 year olds scorned. The police implored Roppo to Tweet to the fans to tell them that the signing was off, but he refused. It took Justin himself Tweeting that his appearance had been canceled for the melee to break, but not before five people, including a police officer, were injured.
It’s obvious that this man did completely the wrong thing and endangered many people needlessly in the hope of drumming up publicity for his label and his client. He’s probably going to have a lot of time in a quiet place to think about his actions if he’s convicted. His charges include endangering the welfare of a child, obstruction of governmental administration, reckless endangerment and criminal nuisance.
What lessons can be learned and applied to other marketing situations?
First and foremost, always do what the police tell you to. Use common sense. Don’t endanger people with crazy stunts for the sake of publicity. I assure you it will backfire.
Second, if your market expects you to communicate using a particular channel, you cannot go offline when the going gets tough. Even in crisis situations, even if you’ve done the wrong thing, you need to communicate with your market. In this case, Roppo drew these fans using Twitter and, once they were in danger, he needed to use the same channel to disburse the crowd.
Third, know the size and scope of your situation and act accordingly. The blame has been shifted by DefJam to the shopping mall for not being prepared to handle the crowds. If this kid is the phenom he obviously seems to be, then the onus should be on the label to ensure that he’s being put somewhere than can support his legions of adoring fans. If you’re participating in market-facing activities like a trade show or conference, ensure that the level of your participation makes sense – have enough materials on hand to distribute, have enough staff on hand to manage booth traffic, and so on.
By Linda Forrest
There’s a war going on on the internet. A war between traditional content providers and consumers. Ironic, given that the battle is over a communication channel, that what we have here is a failure to communicate.
It’s been impossible for me to avoid information lately about paid content on the internet, subscription models for newspapers online, and Rupert Murdoch’s gaffes when it comes to information distribution in a connected world.
It all started with an article in a recent Vanity Fair about Murdoch’s determined stance on making readers pay for online content. The fact that he told an interviewer last week that he plans to drive readers to the paid content by blocking Google from indexing his newspapers, a move that renders their content invisible to the world at large, shows that, as Michael Woolf posits, perhaps he just doesn’t understand what’s at stake here and just how pervasive Google is.
As Valleywag suggested, perhaps Murdoch should read a recent report from Forrester that says that 80% of the 4,000 consumers polled will not pay for online newspaper content and that the remainder are divided on the payment model they’d agree to (subscription versus paying for individual articles).
The real trouble starts when you factor in that 60% of newspaper executives are working on paid-content models. Yikes.
Today’s media world is transparent for those who wish to see, Have a question for your marketplace? Then pose it in any of the many channels available to you. You’ll quickly learn what your customers want and what they don’t want. The fact that those in control of the traditional media aren’t even trying to really understand the tools available to them and devising new revenue models around this new reality is just pathetic. Perhaps the traditional media deserves to dwindle to the point of irrelevance if it’s so unaware of its environment.
The idea of including marketing in an agile product development strategy, as @FrancisMoran wrote about earlier this week, isn’t all that far removed from what newspaper execs need to do here. Listen to your market as you’re deciding what to do and involve them in the process. Rather than engineer newspaper content delivery to suit your revenue desires, find out how your readers want to access your content and build a revenue strategy around that. Seems obvious…
By Linda Forrest
Finally, Amazon has announced that its e-book reader, the Kindle, is available to Canadians. While much of the rest of the world has been happily e-reading for quite some time, we’re just now being graced with Kindle’s presence, something I wrote about last month.
While I’m an avid reader, I can’t quite imagine reading a novel on an e-reader, though the fact that the Kindle would alleviate the constant challenge we face in our household to find bookshelf space for the masses of reading material we own, is rather appealing. Still, we’ve already placed our order for a new bookshelf from Santa rather than a Kindle. Perhaps next year.
By Linda Forrest
This week, as usual, we’ve been doing myriad media and analyst relations activities on our clients’ behalf. I’ve been reminded time and again how important it is to adhere to best practices and how if you do, both your agency and your clients will be well served.
Let me provide some examples, and link back to previous posts on this blog that reveal what we feel are best practices in each area.
Sciemetric Instruments, a quality management systems technology vendor and one-time inmedia client that recently returned to the fold, is in the midst of a series of briefings with the most influential analysts in their field, both at boutique firms and the biggest firms. We counseled the company on how best to present its story to analysts, both those it has spoken with in the past and those with whom it is speaking for the first time. The briefings are going very well and we’re not only increasing awareness for the company but also gathering actionable insight into how the company might engage each of these firms to best effect. Our Danny Sullivan, @inmedian, has written about how best to engage with analysts here, here and here.
As we’re still in the early months of our engagement with Agresso, we’ve been working to set measurable objectives for our work, something @FrancisMoran wrote about in his series on PR measurement here, here and here. Agresso told us they selected us as their PR agency of record against some of the stiffest international competition we have ever faced at least in part because our methodology would give them clear, unambiguous objectives against which they could readily evaluate our performance and their PR ROI.
I’ve been doing considerable pro bono work for Help Lesotho, a charitable organization working to support at-risk youth in a tiny African nation that’s been ravaged by HIV and AIDS. There is a big event coming up and we’re working to create a groundswell of media coverage across Canada by profiling local supporters who have been invited to Ottawa to meet the King of Lesotho, who is coming here to express his gratitude. The process of gathering the information is the same whether our client is a charity or a technology company; it’s important to get the whole story and so we’ve been updating the media kit for Help Lesotho, speaking with internal knowledge-keepers at HL, gathering information from the supporters themselves and developing the right media list.
Singletouch, a vendor of a data-capture platform for contractors, is about to launch into the U.K. and simultaneously make an announcement in North America, which means that it’s time to refresh the media list. This task, though grueling, is vitally important to make sure that our list is up to date so we’re pushing against the right levers on our client’s behalf. @LeoValiquette wrote about the importance of a media list refresh here.
NetCentric Technologies, developer and marketer of document-compliance software, is in the process of submitting bylined articles to its key publications. Contributed articles written by subject-matter experts can be a high-value component of an integrated PR program. They can shed light on issues in the marketplace that are under-reported or misunderstood, provide a solid business case for a technology offering, provide a step by step how to, and on and on. @LindaForrest – that’s me! – wrote about bylined articles here.
I’d list more of what we’re working on but perhaps my time is best spent doing the work rather than writing about the methodology behind it.
As you can see, we’re quite busy these days! Luckily, we’ve got a clear set of best practices in each of our practice areas to abide by, which makes the tasks a whole lot easier.
By Linda Forrest
It’s been a busy time for Twitter.
The microblogging platform, on which all of the authors on this blog have accounts – @FrancisMoran, @LindaForrest and @inmedian – has recently announced several key partnerships that will move the social media platform from the early adopter stage to the mainstream. Microsoft and Google announced a few weeks ago that they would include “Tweets” in their search results, legitimizing for many skeptics the platform as a bona fide media channel and information source. Then, today, a partnership with LinkedIn was announced wherein Twitterstreams will be included in LinkedIn profiles.
This is a big step, and should increase adoption in the professional world from the dismal figures IDC collected earlier this year. Not to mention how it will impact Twitter’s bottom-line; it’s value was theoretical for a very long time but with a handful of powerful partnerships such as these, the money will be rolling in.
